Today we were informed by our email service provider that your email address was exposed due to unauthorized access of their system. Our email service provider deploys emails on our behalf to customers who opted into email-based communications from us.

We were advised by our email service provider that the information that was obtained was limited to first name and/or email addresses only. Your service and any other personally identifiable information were not at risk and remain secure.Please note, it is possible you may receive spam email messages as a result. We want to urge you to be cautious when opening links or attachments from unknown third parties.

We regret this has taken place and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused you. We take your privacy very seriously and we will continue to work diligently to protect your personal information.

If you have unsubscribed in the past, there is no need to unsubscribe again. Your preferences will remain in place.

Sincerely,The TiVo Team

Epsilon is not the only major email services provider to be hacked in recent months. SilverPop Systems, Inc., a rival firm recently had a large scale intrusion and lost customer email databases belonging to McDonald's Corp. (MCD), Walgreen Company (WAG), and deviantArt LLC.

Clothing boutique chain New York & Company (NWY), another Epsilon customer, also revealed to customers that it was affected by the breach.

According to a report in SecurityWeek, other customers that had their databases lost in the breach include US Bank, JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM); Verizon Communications, Inc. (VZ);Capital One Financial Corp. (COF); Marriott International, Inc. (MAR); the Ritz-Carlton Hotel Company LLC; Citigroup, Inc. (C); Brookstone, Inc.; McKinsey & Co., Inc.; the Kroger Comp. (KR); and Walgreen Comp. (again!). These organizations have not all confirmed the breach, though several have announced that they are investigating whether data was lost.

A quick Google search reveals India's Jet Airways (632617) and Kraft Foods Inc. (KFT) are also customers of Epsilon. It is unclear whether their databases were compromised, but customers who have given their emails to these firms should beware

In theory, as the TiVo email alludes to, the primary motivation for such attacks would be to collect addresses for a spamming campaign. A lesser possibility is that the intrusions were conducted by hackers looking to test their skills and less interested in what they found.

If there's one lesson from this story, it's that while it's okay to give your email to marketers, it's wise to use a dedicated account for this purpose, with a non-standard password so as to provide yourself with an extra layer of online security.

Updated: Monday, April 4, 2011, 11:42 a.m. --

Readers are reporting that Best Buy Co., Inc. (BBY) also is emailing customers telling them that its email service provider (surprise!) Eclipse has lost their information. Customers subscribed to the Rewards Zone program are likely effected.

As email service providers like SilverPop and Eclipse tend to keep their contracts semi-confidential, this may not be the last of the additional firms we discover to be affected.

Updated 2: Monday, April 4, 2011, 2:00 p.m. --

As we predicted, there are more victims of the breach.

Apparently staffing firm Robert Half International Inc. (RHI) and Ameriprise Financial, Inc. (AMP) were also Epsilon customers. Both firms have sent emails warning users that their information may have been lost.

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You haven't dealt with good recruiters then. I have dealt with bad ones and good ones. The good ones have the ability to notice talent without just checking buzz words.

I have gone through people that blow past me cause I don't have 10 years of experience, then I get other people who talk to me for a bit, put me in front of the hiring managers and technical people and I knock it out of the park for them. I had two companies fighting for me because of how well I did in the interviews, both called back within a few hours of the interview to hire me. The big reason I got in front of them was because of good recruiters (granted I'm loaded with Cisco certs and know how to talk to people, but that isn't everything).

Now, the reason I knock it out of the park in the interviews is because I'm damn good at what I do (I'm super humble if you didn't notice), but it is hard to put that into a resume no matter who you are.

I was speaking from the perspective of someone doing the hiring - I'm part owner & head the product development of one company while simultaneously being the principal owner and product manager of another.

While I have had good experience with recruiters early in my career while looking for jobs (they're people that get paid by someone who isn't you to get you hired - I thought that was amazing when I was on the other end of the stick), the experience is usually much less enjoyable for the purpose of doing hiring. For one, most of the top talent out there do not use recruiters. In fact, recruiters usually annoy them non-stop with job offers (I don't even have a resume out there and I am constantly bombarded with recruiter e-mails on a daily basis - and then just logging into facebook I get 12 different job ads per screen I go to).

In practice, what usually happens is several recruiters contact you and all try and sell you as hard as they possibly can on believing that their candidates are the best so that they get the check at the end of the day and not the other guys. They don't actually care about the quality of the applicant, just that they last long enough to get past whatever terms were in the recruiter's contract such that he/she gets paid.

So what happens is you end up spending a lot of money for a mediocre employee that demoralizes your whole team full of stars.

I guess I'm confused as you are making silly sweeping judgements about an entire group of people based on just your dealings. My question is if you are hiring these people and they suck, aren't you really to blame? I mean you are bound to get a few bad apples out of any batch, that is just reality, but if it is so bad you blame all recruiters, maybe (likely) it is you.

I have worked for places that hired through recruiting agencies, some sucked, some were amazing employees. They can't filter perfectly, they aren't there to do so anyway. A recruiter is there to try to find you talent so you don't have to, then you filter the good from the bad.

Lastly, where do you get the idea that top talent don't use recruiters? I know people all over in the technical field that do nothing but contracts through recruiters and plenty of good people who get hired on by a recruiter. Recruiting agencies are just there to offload the hunting work.

If you have this much of an issue with recruiters, maybe you need to look within, cause I have never heard this sort of complaint from any hiring manager about recruiters. Then again, maybe it is the way you deal with recruiters, a lot of the ones I have dealt with are either major or exclusive recruiters for the company, so they have a good relationship with the hiring firm and therefore are more worried about their reputation when sending people over.